ALEX ISRAEL: NOIR

Gagosian is pleased to announce Noir, an exhibition of new paintings by Alex Israel.

February 6 - March 22, 2025

An LA artist who doesn’t reckon with noir is a flickering bulb that lures no moths, and maybe no bulb at all. So I was glad to hear that Alex Israel, who was born and grew up here, who lives and works and belongs here, was doing the native reckoning where else but Warner Bros., or what’s left of it, where John Huston and Humphrey Bogart (and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet) made The Maltese Falcon for six summer weeks of 1941. If anyone called it the first noir, I wouldn’t fight them.

Some say noir is a genre, to which I would argue, there are noir musicals; others have said, with better evidence, that noir is a style, but it takes more than shadowed light through venetian blinds to do the dirty deed. I’ve heard it said that noir is a mood: doom, but Titanic (1997) is no Criss Cross (1949).

Upon first seeing the works in a warehouse-like space on the edge of the Burbank backlot, I was home. The Troubadour, the Cadillac dealership in the Valley, the Bruin Theater in Westwood . . . The combination of their CinemaScope proportions and my memory—our memory, if you’re one of ours—put me there in the virtual reality of a beloved present/past. Or is it “past/present”? The locations Israel picked for his pictures are undeniably of their time—the 1940s car dealership, the ’50s diner, the ’60s gas station, the ’70s lingerie shop, the ’80s yogurt spot—but still a part of the present. When you add to that your own memories, the temporal effect on the brain is kaleidoscopic. Not where am I, but when am I?

And those who love Los Angeles share Israel’s view that our city can be beautified by illusions. We know that “Hollywood Liquor”—to borrow from a cheery, brightly lit sign on Israel’s Hollywood Boulevard—is better than no liquor at all, and that those who don’t dream don’t know they’re already dead. Look at Israel’s skies: it’s night, yes, but what a night.